Diabetes: Could Sugar-Sweetened Fruit Juice Raise Your Risk Even More than Soda?

A new study suggests that sugar-sweetened fruit juices are absolutely not good alternatives to soda.

Julie Palmer, ScD, M.PH. and her colleagues from Boston University report in the Archives of Internal Medicine that African-American women who drank two or more sugar-sweetened fruit drinks per day had a 31% greater incidence of diabetes than those who consumed less than one a month. (Grapefruit and orange juices, however, weren’t linked to greater rates of diabetes amongst study subjects.)

That’s probably not news to most people, but this finding might be: African-American women who drank two or more non-diet sodas daily had a 24% greater incidence of diabetes over those who indulged less than once a month.

Does this mean that as far as diabetes risk goes, most sugar-sweetened fruit drinks are even worse for you than sweetened soda, which is certainly unhealthy in its own right? Or did the juice drinkers in the study consume more juice than the soda drinkers drank soda?

Either way, this is important research to combat claims that fruit juice is healthy, particularly since it’s so often marketed that way to kids and their parents. (Click this website from the juice lobby (Juice Products Association) to see what I mean.)

And anyway, if you really prefer your fruits in juice form, why not buy yourself a juicer and make some at home with fresh fruits and no added sugar? Or, better yet, juice some green veggies.